Mark Landsbaum: Future not now for electric cars

I sing the body electric, so to speak. Which is to say, this writer is all for electric-powered vehicles.

I've enjoyed many trips over grassy knolls in golf carts. Great fun. And it's no fun every week or so to pour another 22 gallons of regular gasoline into my truck to the tune of $80 to $90. But it's likely most Californians, probably most human beings, share my conclusion that for the foreseeable future electric rides will probably be best enjoyed at golf courses and in amusement-park bumper cars.

In 1896, Henry Ford reportedly asked Thomas Edison whether it was feasible to power automobiles with electricity instead of the internal combustion engine. Tom is said to have replied that electricity isn't a good idea because automobiles "must keep near to power stations" and "the battery is too heavy."

The anecdote may be apocryphal. What is certain is that what the inventor of the electric light bulb and other devices that harnessed electric power purportedly told the automotive pioneer remains true today.

I sort of understand the appeal of electric-powered, even partially electric-powered vehicles. They run more quietly. They don't spew much stuff into the air, maybe. They may well be the future. But they're a lousy option for now to get from here to there reliably, conveniently or even economically. The short explanation is: If you must plug it in, you can't go far.

"All-electric cars are The Next Big Thing. And they always will be," wrote Robert Bryce in his book, "Power Hungry, The Myths of 'Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future." Bryce's sarcasm may seem harsh, but there's more truth to it than proponents of electric cars care to admit.

For a century we have been assured electric-vehicle salvation is just around the corner, so to speak. The failure to deliver on that promise was restated in recent studies, in 2008 at the Center on Global Change at Duke University, and in 2009 at Carnegie Mellon University. The Duke study concluded gasoline prices must soar to more than $6 per gallon for plug-in hybrid cars to be cost effective. At Carnegie Mellon they found plug-ins "sized for 40 or more miles of electric-only travel do not offer the lowest lifetime cost in any scenario."

So, what then is the advantage?

There must be monumental benefits because your government is devoting monumental amounts of your taxes to bring about electric-car salvation. Meanwhile, the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf this year joined the Tesla Roadster and others already on the market, with a half-dozen more models expected to debut soon from major and minor car manufacturers. Can the benefits be far off?

"The Chevrolet Volt is beginning to look like it was manufactured by Atlas Shrugged Motors, where the government mandates everything politically correct, rewards its cronies and produces junk steel," the libertarian Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels recently wrote at Forbes.com. "This is the car that subsidies built. ... GM has continually revised downward its estimates of how far the machine would go before the gas engine fired, and now says 25 to 50 miles."

The problem for electric-only power is the battery doesn't last. For plug-in, all-electric cars like the Nissan Leaf, an exhausted battery means the trip's over. For plug-in hybrid-electric cars like the Volt, it's the point where the gasoline engine takes over. In my humble view that pretty much negates the reason for the electric motor.

"Reach" is how battery exhaustion is measured, as in "your car will reach this spot when your battery dies." Consumer Reports said tests showed the Volt gets 25 miles of battery life, but that was partly attributed to being tested in cold Connecticut, despite GM's PR stance that cold weather doesn't much affect performance.

Aren't you dying to find out what running the air conditioner full blast during a long August commute on I-5 will do to "reach?" Stranded in Pico Rivera, no doubt.

One way to stretch the reach is to scrimp elsewhere. Anything that draws on the car's battery for power, naturally, reduces battery charge life. To get a few more miles out of your Volt, you may have to put up with a tepid car heater, which, in places like Connecticut, can be annoying.

How's this for annoying? A run-of-the-mill Honda Accord, which seats five rather than the Volt's four, gets 34 miles on the highway to a single gallon of gas versus the Volt's 25 miles to the single battery charge. And you can buy an Accord for about half the price of a Volt, even after factoring in the tax bribe – sorry, tax credit.

The government has to resort to offering a $7,500 bribe, which they call a tax credit, to encourage consumers to shell out $41,000 for a Volt. This "incentive" is even more insidious. It's your own money the government deigns not to take from you if you do what the government wants you to do.

Of course, this occurs only after the electric-car industry digests $2.4 billion from President Barack Obama's stimulus (more money that once belonged to you, me and the rest of the taxpaying public) to jump-start the electric car industry. That includes $1.5 billion given to battery manufacturers, who for a century have had some difficulty turning out a light-enough, powerful-enough, cheap-enough power source on their own dime. Then there's the $500 million in your tax money doled out to makers of plug-in electric vehicle components, and the $400 million to build infrastructure for charging the cars.

You might think that anything worthwhile wouldn't need so much of your and my money to make it fly, or to drive 40 miles. So we repeat: What, then, is the advantage?

It's green, they say. It runs on clean electrical energy. Uh, make that clean electrical energy largely generated from dirty coal-powered power plants. Those in search of the holy grail of small carbon footprints have a surprise in store. After calculating the percentage of coal-fired power to generate a mile of electric-car reach, it turns out that the Volt accounts for more CO2 emissions than does burning gasoline – 0.55 pounds to the mile compared with 0.53.

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